Reading Room

Russia’s aggression against Georgia and Ukraine as well as its reluctance to resolve the frozen conflicts in the region demonstrate that Eastern Europe is again a contested geopolitical sphere between Russia and the European Union. President...

There is no doubt that the appearance of the latest edited volume by Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor, Australia’s American Alliance, is a timely contribution. But how timely? The surprise election of Donald Trump as the 45th...

If we’d had a competition for the most admired voice in Australian broadcasting, certainly the most distinctive, chances are the late Mark Colvin would have earned the votes of his peers.
Mark might have shied from the comparison but if we...

Professor William Maley’s book, What is a Refugee? seeks to contribute to the knowledge of the general reader about the complexity of refugee issues. It is a timely and valuable contribution given the context of the ongoing Syrian refugee...

Judging by the plethora of recent books and academic articles, the field of transitional justice scholarship is booming. A gradual broadening of the field also seems to be underway with scholars identifying an ever-widening range of processes...

Papua New Guinea rarely figures in public discussions about Australia’s defence and security planning. Australia’s policy tunnel vision focuses almost exclusively on the United States while its limited peripheral vision selectively takes in East...

East Timor Intervention: A Retrospective on INTERFET, edited by John Blaxland, is an exemplary piece of work and recommended reading for anyone interested in East Timor or peacekeeping.
Although there have been previous works assessing the...

International relations experts and practitioners have tended to frame the responsibility to protect principle (R2P) as a radical departure from a long history of absolutist sovereignty that prevailed following the Peace of Westphalia in the...

The title of James Curran’s new book, Fighting with America, is deliberately ambiguous. Australia has repeatedly fought alongside America but Australia has also ‘fought’ in disagreements with America and the United States has done the...

The notion of an Indo-Pacific region has now been circulating for at least half a decade. It first emerged in a flurry of policy documents in the early 2010s most notably, in an Australian context, in the Gillard government’s Defence White Paper...